X 
362 
had a beginning, then it was no voluntary decision or act of God, but was 
equivalent to the fate of the Stoics. It was useless to call it a choice, if it 
had been always settled. To extend this kind of Destiny to the Universe 
was to displace all Theism, and affirm Pantheism. God was no First 
Agent in any free sense ; His action was necessity. If His first acting, 
so also His subsequent acting. His “governing” the phenomenal Universe 
was but nominal — merely a mode of speech equivalent to saying that 
everything happens according to Eternal plan. The plan was His 
because co-existent with Himself — so that He never conceived it de novo , 
never originated it, but only worked in it as the involuntary centre of an 
Eternal mechanism. 
Another line of thought seemed for a moment to be possible to a few. 
God having always the design of the phenomenal future of the Universe, 
in every detail, unalterably within Him, created by necessity all the phe- 
nomena, together with certain necessary sub-causes, limiting Himself to 
the direction or sustaining of those causes, and in that sense “governing” 
the world. But this will not vindicate any really personal action for the 
Deity, since all His direction of the created suh-causes must, according to 
the predestining scheme, be fixed beforehand. 
The object of the Religious predestinarians was to get rid of the idea of 
“ Contingency ” and “ Will ” from the human mind as arrogant and even 
profane. 
“ Contingency I leave to infidels,” was the earnest disclaimer of one of 
the best and most eloquent of the deniers of “ Free-will ” ; not perceiving 
that free election or choice was thus denied to God as well as man ; nor 
seeing that there really is no alternative but Contingency or Pantheism. 
It was seen by such writers as Dr. Priestley that “ Philosophical Necessity,” 
as he termed it, stretching hack into the eternal past, and onward into the 
everlasting future, was Materialism in another form. 
The Predestinarians failed, however, in another way to think out their 
subject. They used the words “ Eternal ” and “ Everlasting” as at times 
the same ; yet applying the former rather to the past and the latter to the 
future. God alone was “ Eternal,” but the creatures formed by Him, or 
some of them, were to he “everlasting.” There was no co-eternal creature, 
but there was a co-everlasting. New confusions of thought were here 
involved. To conceive that Being before Time might not be “continuous 
Being,” was not possible ; and to conceive of Being after Time as “lasting ” 
was to assign “ before and after ” to the Creator as well as creature, and to 
conceive Him as “continuous” in the future, if not in the past, thus 
changing the unchangeable. Then new distinctions as to “ Existence” 
and “ Duration ” were revived, and the controversy seemed on the way 
back to the schools, and the old philosophy ; when it came to an abrupt 
close, for want of an Ontology which should distinguish the absolute from 
the conditioned, the d priori from the phenomenal. (See the Bampton 
Lectures of J870, pp. 168, &c.) 
